You are nobody without an API Key generator

calendar Dec 12, 2010 · 1 min read · ideas python  ·
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API KEYs are sexy: if you have a web based business (like Google, Twitter, Facebook or Wordpress'Automattic) you should have a way to generate an API Key for web service integration.

Like Session keys, API keys should be sufficiently unpredictable to be psuedo-random. To be unpredictable, no user variables (or timestamps) are encoded into the key.

A small pythonic way to do the trick is this piece of code: [python]import hashlib, random hashlib.sha224( str(random.getrandbits(256)) ).hexdigest();[/python] you can also shell-ize it : [shell]python -c 'import hashlib, random ; print hashlib.sha224( str(random.getrandbits(128)) ).hexdigest()'[/shell]  

Finally, for a longer  explanation take a look to this blog entry